How It Works
The premise behind the import/export function is to allow the System Administrator to select either all or a filtered list of users for exporting. The user has a very granular level of control and can locate the users to be affected by using the powerful search and filtering features.
Once the users to be modified have been located, the administrator may export the list to an Excel document. This process extracts key fields from the database table that contains the user accounts. Only fields that the administrator should be able to view or modify are exported. Fields such as passwords and other system information fields are not exported during the process.
When the administrator clicks the export button the system will generate an Excel document and prompt the user to open or save it to their local computer. To open the file, the user will have to have Microsoft Office Excel or some other program installed that is capable of opening and editing Excel documents.
After the file is generated and downloaded to the user's computer, the contents may be modified. When the user is satisfied with the modifications, the file must be saved and then uploaded back to the server using the import process.
Once the file is uploaded, the server performs a basic data integrity check on the contents. It will inform the user of the results of the integrity check. If the contents of the file are acceptable, the user will be given the option to process the file effectively merging the information in the spreadsheet into the database.
Processing includes making a backup copy of the affected database tables. The system will loop through all the uploaded records and make any modifications to the existing user accounts based on the settings contained in the uploaded Excel document.
When the processing is complete, the user will receive a message informing the user of the number of records that were processed.
For more information regarding the database tables affected, please view the help topic shown below.